Neil J. Weissman, MD, president of MedStar Health's research arm, talks about daily life in the MedStar Health Research Institute

Sunday, December 8, 2013

QSPAC

Any idea what QSPAC stands for? Well, on Friday I had the privilege to present the annual research report to QSPAC so I thought I would use the opportunity to let you know about some of the work happening 'behind the scene.' QSPAC stands for the Quality,
Safety and Professional Affairs committee of the Board of Directors of
MedStar Health. This committee has oversight for all quality, safety,
performance and improvement initiatives across all clinical services
across MedStar Health. They monitor the extent to which patient care
meets certain standards of care, are rendered in a manner consistent
with MedStar's value of service excellence and are delivered in
compliance with all applicable regulations and accreditation
requirements.

The QSPAC committee also has oversight for system initiatives in medical education and research and as such, I give an annual report on research. This year, I provided an update on our health services research (HSR) initiative, since this is a major initiative which is part of the system's strategic plan. I started by reminding them that HSR is research on the delivery of care (quality, safety, outcomes, cost effectiveness, etc). In the calendar year 2013, we have 29 open HSR studies with a total value of over $6M. I then provided a summary of the studies and highlighted 4 (see slides to the right) as examples.

Congratulations to all the investigators and the teams that support them on great work in relatively short time in building the health services research capacity at MedStar Health!